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Understanding someone else\u2019s mind sounds extremely positive and is a great way to foster connections. However, what happens when understanding someone else\u2019s mind leads to negative outcomes such as caring less<\/em> about others? Here we delve into both sides of the coin for mind perception – the good and the bad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Components of mind perception that we will discuss below include mind detection, theory of mind, humanization, and dehumanization<\/strong>. Mind detection<\/strong> includes the identification of another entity with a mind, whereas theory of mind<\/strong> is the ability to infer the thoughts, feelings, desires of other people (Epley & Waytz, 2010). Humanization<\/strong> is attributing basic human qualities to others (Haslam, 2006) whereas dehumanization<\/strong> is the failure to attribute basic human qualities to others (Epley & Waytz, 2012) .<\/span><\/p>\n Kara: The Good<\/b><\/p>\n \u201cAre you thinking what I\u2019m thinking?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This is a line I repeat to my twin sister probably twice a day. Feeling so connected with someone else\u2019s mind has never felt easier. Inferring thoughts and feelings of someone I grew up with, share the same DNA with, and understand so well is something I consider to be a great success of mind perception in my personal life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the Wheatley reading and in class, we learned how easy it is to recognize a face. As humans, we overstate the importance of the face as a stimulus; they ultimately serve as facades of other\u2019s minds (Wheatley et al., 2012). There was a huge jumble of objects in a collage on a big screen. When asked about the location of money, it took over two minutes. When asked about the location of a face, it was almost instantaneous. Now imagine if that face looks exactly like yours. Even more instantaneous. That is a metaphor for mind perception with an identical twin sister and one that I recognize everyday.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another perk of mind perception is the ease in facilitating social connection and interaction. My sister and I joke that we just constantly blabber to each other at lightning speed. There is zero response time; we just laugh and instantly continue the conversation, jumping from one conversation to the next. Researchers found that conversations with faster response times felt more connected, and a third party perceived the conversation as more enjoyable (Templeton et al., 2022). <\/span>No wonder,<\/span><\/i> I thought, when I first read the article and connected it to my sister.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, Wheatley and his team found that the brain has the same electro-cortical response for dolls and humans, but there is a significantly larger response to human faces (Wheatley et al, 2011). The increased firing for human faces compared to inanimate objects fosters a greater sense of sociality and interaction between human to human. Another topic close to mind perception is humanization. Studies found that humanizing others nourishes healthier relationships and creates more sustainable bonds in the long run (Castro & Zautra, 2016). Combining the firing of the brain\u2019s cortical responses with the humanization creating long-term healthy bonds, it sets humans up for the perfect recipe of social connection and belonging. Being empathetic is a quality I really admire. I think we can all agree it is a great character trait to demonstrate. Failing to consider another person\u2019s perspective or mind is dehumanizing that person. Being empathetic is essentially humanizing and taking the perspective of another person, and of course, super advantageous in making new friends and connections. Mind perception is a fundamental tool in understanding others and forming these close social connections that we crave as humans.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Orion: The Bad<\/b><\/p>\n Social Connection Enables Dehumanization. <\/span><\/i>This conclusion, outlined by Waytz and Epley in their 2012 paper of the same title, raises immediate concerns about the implications of meeting one\u2019s own need for belongingness on others. As a self-identified relationship anarchist, or, a person who believes that love and connection are not a zero-sum game, the thought that \u201cincreasing social connection diminishes the motivation to connect with the minds of additional others and increases the social distance between the self and more distant others\u201d directly questions my closely held beliefs about our ability to love (Waytz <\/span>&<\/span> Epley, 2012). My newfound sense of belonging with my roommates this year floated to the surface as I scanned the disturbing findings. Our friendship is built on a foundation of shared values and multiple overlapping identities, and they fill a need for belonging that I\u2019m not sure was met even before the pandemic began. This is great, of course; my level of confidence, security, and general wellbeing has mostly skyrocketed since being part of this little friend group, where we work consistently to value, humanize, and understand each other. But I cannot help but wonder if our radical inclusivity when it comes to our unique insecurities, flaws, and struggles is not also inherently exclusionary. Have I, in cultivating such close bonds with them, begun seeing others less complexly?<\/span><\/p>\n This is not the first time I\u2019ve felt such a compelling sense of belonging. In high school I was a proudly self-described theater kid, spending most of my hours backstage chatting, eating, and doing homework with other theater kids, even when not actively working on a production. I am sure that any team activity – sports, chess club, editorial teams – lends itself to the formation of this sort of shared identity. Working with other actors as part of a cast not only provides a teamwork-based foundation for closeness but actively encourages you to mentalize, mimic, and generally tune yourself to the thoughts and feelings of your castmates, because these are the things that contribute to great on-stage chemistry. Perspective-taking, or imagining oneself in the mental and emotional state of another, is literally baked into the craft. But there was something else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It is my experience that the shared \u201ctheater kid\u201d identity that compels us to sequester ourselves backstage involves a feeling of <\/span>un<\/span><\/i>belonging everywhere else. We are often, but not always, a queer, neurodiverse, or otherwise \u201cdifferent\u201d bunch, which can make traditional high school hallways a less than comfortable environment. The fact that we humanize each other so intensely provides a much-needed home base and safety net for navigating school, and I think this is good and necessary. With time, though, I see how this also worked to reinforce my belief that I would not be accepted and isolate myself from others. Occasionally, I have, in years since graduating, met and connected with a classmate outside of theater who remembers me – remembers what classes I took and which performances I was in, what I was studying, and where I worked for my senior project – while I did not remember very much about them at all. This troubles me, especially because the reason I do not remember is almost always that I assumed they, as people outside my in-group, would not accept me. So I just didn\u2019t pay very close attention.<\/span><\/p>\n While this is of course a bit of a sad realization, Waytz and Epley outline far more serious consequences to our failure to humanize than missed high-school connections. It is, according to them, the mechanism of satiated need for belonging leading to indifference, not necessarily hatred, that laid the groundwork for the most atrocious crimes human beings have committed against one another in history. What do we do with this information? Obviously, I do not think it wise to starve ourselves of such a basic need for belongingness and connection. I do think we have a calling we cannot ignore to build communities that are affirming, supportive, and uplifting – but do so without defining a rigid, inflexible \u201cthem\u201d and \u201cus.\u201d There is hope for this: one study found that having a strong moral identity, or sense of identification with the moral values of one\u2019s communities, makes people \u201cmore likely to extend moral concern\u201d to those outside their in-group (Smith et al., 2014). Yet more research is needed in identifying the protective factors that can help us continue to humanize others while meeting our own need for connection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n References\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Epley, N., & Waytz, A. (2010). Mind perception.<\/span><\/p>\n Wheatley, T., Kang, O., Parkinson, C., & Looser, C. E. (2012). From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(8), 589-606.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Wheatley, T., Weinberg, A., Looser, C., Moran, T., & Hajcak, G. (2011). Mind perception: Real but not artificial faces sustain neural activity beyond the N170\/VPP. PloS one, 6(3), e17960.<\/span><\/p>\n Castro, S. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Humanization of social relations: Nourishing health and resilience through greater humanity. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 36(2), 64\u201380.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Waytz, A., & Epley, N. (2012). Social connection enables dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 70\u201376.<\/span><\/p>\n Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and social psychology review, 10(3), 252-264.<\/span><\/p>\n Melophilius (2016). Good Days and Bad [gif]. Imgur.\u00a0https:\/\/imgur.com\/gallery\/SV5hgpE\/comment\/673589168<\/p>\n Smith, I. H., Aquino, K., Koleva, S., & Graham, J. (2014). The moral ties that bind . . . Even to out-groups: The interactive effect of moral identity and the binding moral foundations. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1554\u20131562.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Templeton, E. M., Chang, L. J., Reynolds, E. A., LeBeaumont, M. D. C., & Wheatley, T. (2022). Fast response times signal social connection in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(4).<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Understanding someone else\u2019s mind sounds extremely positive and is a great way to foster connections. However, what happens when understanding someone else\u2019s mind leads to negative outcomes such as caring less about others? Here we delve into both sides of the coin for mind perception – the good and the bad.\u00a0 Components of mind perception […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10637,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[321273,320893],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-humanization","tag-mind-perception"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10637"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}